My thighs are still burning as I leave the bus and run downstairs to catch the train at the 95th Red Line Station. Signs boasting a new station coming soon have been here for months and they haven’t so much as put a new tile down yet.
A man peddling from one train car to the other offers candy, headphones, bootleg DVDs and tube socks. Body oils are fastened in bandolier-type belts crisscross on his chest. A younger man enters the opposite way, proclaiming, “Got dem squares. Eight-dollar packs. Got dat loud.”
A hustler sits in the middle of the aisle and tries enticing us to play a shell game, already rigged in his favor. The train is a mobile market, squeezing together the good, the needy, the savage and the gullible.
There is a man on the train who keeps looking for something in his bag. He takes out coins and old newspapers and used tissues. He mumbles to himself and I can’t really make out any of the words. He can’t find what he’s looking for so he keeps searching.
I call Ruby’s phone. Straight to voice mail. Damn it.
After Ruby tried to kill herself, she had a copy made of her house key and gave it to me. You know, just in case, she said. After the hospital, Ruby stayed with me. Becoming as much of a fixture at our house as the leaking faucet, the cracked third stair, the buckled roof tiles where the squirrels would get in and scurry about.
I hated her. I loved her. I love her. I’m angry with her, for not doing more, the ways she harms herself. I’m scared of Ruby’s pain and how that pain consumes everything, how it consumes me.
Memories and regrets and hopes are the annoying song on repeat in my head. The train flies down the tracks. I rock side to side and look through the graffiti-decorated window. This place, these gatherings of neighborhoods and streets and people are so easily dismissed by others and sometimes myself. The South Side. It is still magic. Troubled, but still magnificent. Dark and light and loud mingle, and I wish we could see our purpose, our gathered meaning. I wish I knew myself with some kind of certainty. I want to help her better. I want so badly to help Ruby.
A bright voice declares my stop, 79th Street, is next. I don’t move from my seat. I still sit. I don’t want to leave, but the voice of the Three Women tell me to Go!
The train stops. Doors open. Young men beat on upside-down ten-gallon buckets in the station, and a primal beat pulses through me, from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. The Bucket Boys move back and forth, twirl the sticks through their nimble, ebony fingers and wooden knocking provides a rat-tat-pop-boom over and over on those buckets. The blocks on this side of the city might stay this way forever, this violent and this beautiful and this hopeful and this tortured.
Each street leading to her house shows some sort of contradiction of wealth and class. Broken beer bottles and plastic containers for cheap wine litter some properties. Other streets are pristine with perfectly cut grass and landscaping.
There are boarded-up buildings and cellular stores boasting they accept Link cards. Through the asphalt canals of brick homes, side-by-side storefront churches, barbershops, hair salons and fast-food parlors that make up rowdy ’hoods, I see glimpses of a past imperfect and distant. I weave a familiar path of blocks as I make it to Ruby’s house.
It’s so pretty. The nicest house on the block in fact. That’s what gets me every time I stand in front of it. One of the many brick bungalows, this is the only one on this stretch made of red brick. Shy buds of the apple blossom tree in the front yard yield tiny bursts of green.
When Ruby and I were girls, we ran around the lawn and J.P. would watch us and sketch on blank pieces of paper. When you’re a kid there are details that are going to stick with you, but you don’t know the significance. You just remember silly games, the feeling of wet grass under your feet.
As an adult, the things I remember now: we didn’t really go into the house. Momma and Auntie Alice sat on the front steps. Auntie Alice would wear long-sleeved sweaters even in the summer and I could see sweat on her forehead. Momma always held her hand. And they watched us. Then Momma and J.P. and I went home.
Ruby looked sad and Auntie Alice looked even sadder when we left, but I didn’t understand. I didn’t know. When I did know, I still didn’t feel like I could do anything. If my father didn’t get involved, if he was seen as powerful in our community, but he felt powerless, what the hell could I do?
That was the way I kept myself in denial. The easiest thing to do is nothing and we were all guilty of it. My parents. People in church. Our community. We sang our songs and prayed our prayers and talked in pleasantries, but very few of us really knew the business of the other. Though gossip would flow, secrecy also flourished. All the evil we find and leave be, we can’t be surprised when it visits, shows up all sharp teeth and vileness.
The lock to this door doesn’t stick and seize up. I can easily fit in the key and I walk right in. Uninvited, just like that night when I found Ruby. I pray I won’t find her the same way.
Go!
“Ruby! Rue, you here?”
No answer.
The wind from the door feels like it’s pushing me farther into the house. I know where her room is and I move toward it. I see the portion of the floor where Auntie Alice lay dead a week ago.
Crimson, in muted shades, still binds itself to the wood. There was an Oriental carpet there, but they probably had to throw it out or maybe it is evidence in her murder and locked up in a dusty lab. I don’t know the procedure. Most of my criminal or legal knowledge comes from movies and television shows.
My legs work where my heart falters. I try to make no sound. No one seems to be home, but this house is watching. These walls know things I don’t know; things that would make a lesser person turn and leave.
There are two breakfast bar stools knocked over in the kitchen and a sink full of dishes. A pearl necklace lies on the table.
Auntie Alice’s craft room is the first door I come to. I enter. Gardenias. It smells like gardenias. A half-finished blanket, folded in thirds, lies across a wood chair. I know Auntie Alice loved to sew. She put tattered things back together in this little room. I close the door.
Lebanon and Auntie Alice’s room is on the other side of the house beyond the bathroom where the door is open. I step quickly, lightly. The bed is unmade and Auntie Alice’s clothes hang in the closet. Limp ghosts of cotton and silk and chiffon in dull colors lightly billow from a weak draft in the floor. Long sleeves and even longer skirts, low heels. She didn’t like to be dressy, said it was vanity and being showy displeased God.
She liked quiet things, flying under the radar. Everything Auntie Alice did was to avoid notice. Attention brought Lebanon and if he was in a mood, pain and trouble would follow. That trouble brought phone calls to my home in the middle of the night or early in the morning.
Momma would answer those calls. Always. Dad stayed in their bedroom, but I know he was awake. I heard the floors creak as he paced back and forth. What are you supposed to say when a friend says her husband beats her? What do you do when you know your friend suffers? There are no rules, there is only listening. That’s what Mom did, that’s what I tried to do, but I can leave my ears open for only so long before my brain churns, makes plans.
The room is humid and dense with an odor of musky, rotting leaves and incense. There’s a picture of Auntie Alice in a bronze frame smiling with Lebanon. I didn’t know she could do that. Smile. Normally the roundness of her face perpetually sagged, and it seemed her mouth could never turn upward. She was always crying or about to cry. The whites of her eyes, slightly yellowed like old lace, held water; a never-ending flow of tears just waiting to free themselves.
I have all these bad memories of her.
Memories, the good ones, are the ones Mom told me about when they were young, before Auntie Alice met Lebanon. Auntie Alice was witty and wanted to be a doctor and was a really good dancer. But that changed, not all of a sudden and at once, but gradually and irreversibly.
Between the bedpost and the wall near the window something dully glints in the fading sunlight. My brain tells me what it is, my heart just doesn’t want to acknowledge the stiff, cold thing I hold in my hand. A bullet. But I can’t change what I see. Bend the shape of it into something pretty. A small thing causing such destruction, and it’s in his room. Which means Lebanon has or had a gun. Which means he very likely killed Auntie Alice. He certainly had the means to. Jesus, I knew it!
And even telling this to my father, saying I found a damn bullet in Lebanon’s bedroom perhaps won’t be enough to convince him that Lebanon is someone beyond his reach.
Out of Lebanon and Auntie Alice’s room, a smaller bedroom lies across the hall—and that room, that tiny box of a world, is Ruby’s.
I open her door with the bullet still in my hand. There’s nothing on the walls but old pink paint. To the right is her small, creaky bed and a Bible in the middle partially covered by her grandma’s blanket. An ugly purple lamp. Her laptop. No Ruby. I want to wait for something, some clue as to where she is, but I also want to get the hell out of here before Lebanon comes back. I quickly pull open drawers and rummage superficially. A slightly open window allows a small breeze to animate the room. The hum of the laptop pulls my attention and I open it. Greyhound bus schedules from Chicago to Memphis, one way. The next one leaves in four hours. I scribble the bus number and time on a scrap piece of paper I pull from my pocket.
My hand accidentally brushes a piece of paper on the nightstand that falls and floats under the bed. As I try to reach for it, I hear him laugh. I stuff the bullet and my scrap paper into my coat pocket.
My bones melt and I start to tremble. I know my friend’s terror.